ABOUT ME

Kathryn Walat is a playwright with
an interest in the details and rhythms of contemporary life.Her play Creation – about music, obsession, and the artistic process – was developed at the Eugene O'Neill Theatre Center/National Playwrights Conference, and premiered at the Theatre @ Boston Court in Pasadena, for which she was nominated for an LA Stage Alliance Ovation Award for Playwriting.

Her play Victoria Martin: Math Team Queen premiered Off-Broadway at the Women’s Project, and was published in New Playwrights: The Best Plays of 2007 (Smith & Kraus); and her politically resonant Bleeding Kansas premiered at the Hangar Theatre (Ithaca) and received a Francesca Primus Citation (American Theatre Critics Association). Other works include See Bat Fly (Brown/Trinity Playwrights Rep, Providence) Ancient Gods of the Backwoods (New Georges’ Germ Project), Know Dog (Salvage Vanguard Theater, Austin), and her one-act Johnny Hong Kong (Perishable Theatre, Providence).

She is also a librettist of contemporary chamber opera. Paul’s Case, adapted from the
Willa Cather story with composer Gregory Spears, premiered at UrbanArias and was produced in New York at PROTOTYPE festival and at Pittsburgh Opera. It was named inThe New Yorker 's list of Ten Notable Performances and Recordings for 2014, and is available on CD from National Sawdust Tracks. Jason and the Argonauts, an opera for young audiences, is another collaboration with Greg Spears, commissioned by the Lyric Opera of Chicago for production in fall 2016. Her latest opera, The Echo Drift (co-librettist), was commissioned and produced by Beth Morrison Projects, HERE, and American Opera Projects, and premiered at the 2018 PROTOTYPE festival in New York.

Current plays in development include: Small Town Values, which appeared at the National Playwrights Conference 2016 at the Eugene O'Neill Theatre Center and in PlayLabs at the Playwrights' Center in Minneapolis; Romeo & Naomi Ramirez, workshopped at the SheWrites International Playwriting Festival 2018 and at the Playwrights' Center in their Ruth Easton New Play Series; and Southern Haunt, a spooky play set in Savannah, presented at Actor's Express Threshold new play festival in Atlanta and at the New York State Writers Institute's Authors Theatre in 2018. She is a 2019 Audrey Resident at New Georges theater company, where she is writing/developing her newest play, Mary Shelley and the Creature.

Kate has received commissions from MCC Theatre, Yale Repertory Theatre, New Georges, and Actors’ Theatre of Louisville (On the Road anthology project). Her work has had readings and workshops at such places as The Public Theater, Playwrights Horizons, Manhattan Theatre Club, Ars Nova, Actors' Express, The Orchard Project, Lark Play Development Center, and Bay Area Playwrights Festival. She is an Affiliated Playwright with New Georges (NYC), and a recent Core Writer at the Playwrights' Center (Minneapolis). Her play See Bat Fly was on The Kilroy's List of most recommended plays by women for 2014, Romeo & Naomi Ramirez was on The Kilroy's List for 2015, and Small Town Values received a Kilroy's Honorable Mention in 2016.

She is a contributor to the In Dialogue playwright column of The Brooklyn Rail, and her writing on theater has also appeared in American Theatre and Time Out New York magazines, and online on TDF Stages and TheaterMania. Her plays are published by
Samuel French and by Playscripts, including three plays for young audiences.

Kate received her BA from Brown University, and her MFA in Playwriting from the Yale School of Drama. She is a faculty member at SUNY Albany, where she teaches playwriting, and splits her time between the beautiful Hudson Valley and New York City.